CelloBello

Get to knowJanuary's Composer of the Month! Learn more about Adrienne Albert!

Award-winning composer Adrienne Albert (ASCAP) has her chamber, choral, vocal, orchestral and wind band works performed throughout the United States and across the globe. Before beginning composing her own music in the 1990s, she enjoyed a long career as a singer working with composers including Igor Stravinsky, Leonard Bernstein, Philip Glass, Gunther Schuller among others,.

Adrienne’s own music has been supported by noteworthy arts organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts, American Composers Forum, Meet The Composer/Rockefeller Foundation, Subito Awards, Mu Phi Epsilon Fraternity, MPE Foundation, ACME, and ASCAP. Recent commissions include works for The Cornell University Chorus, Harvard-Westlake School, Holyoke Civic Symphony, Mu Phi Epsilon Foundation, Palisades Virtuosi, Zinkali Trio, Pennsylvania Academy of Music, Chamber Music Palisades, Pacific Serenades as well as private individuals.

A graduate of UCLA, Adrienne studied composition privately with Stephen Mosko, and orchestration with Albert Harris. Her music has been recorded on MSR, Naxos, Navona, Centaur, Little Piper, Albany, and ABC Records. Adrienne's publishing company is Kenter Canyon Music (ASCAP). Her music can also be found through Falls House Press, FluteWorld, Theodore Front Musical Literature, and Trevco Music

Start working on a new and inspiring cello work at: https://cellobello.org/repertoire/

We are delighted that cellist Paul Katz returns to our faculty! http://bit.ly/p-katz

Katz was the cellist of the Grammy Award-winning Cleveland Quartet for 26 years. During his tenure, the quartet made more than 70 recordings and in 1973 became the first classical musicians to appear in performance at the Grammy Awards. Katz is the Artistic Director and Founder of CelloBello, an international cello website featuring video lessons, masterclasses, and regular blog posts by cellists and teachers. Katz is on faculty at the New England Conservatory, where he directs NEC’s Professional String Quartet Training Program.

Get to know December's Composer of the Month! Learn more about Rebecca Clarke!

Rebecca Helferich Clarke (1886-1979) was a British classical composer and violist. Internationally renowned as a viola virtuoso, she also became one of the first female professional orchestral players in London.

Rebecca Clarke had a German mother and an American father, and spent substantial periods of her life in the United States, where she permanently settled after World War II. She was born in Harrow and studied at the Royal Academy of Music and Royal College of Music in London. Stranded in the United States at the outbreak of World War II, she married composer and pianist James Friskin in 1944. Clarke died at her home in New York at the age of 93.

Although Clarke's output was not large, her work was recognised for its compositional skill and artistic power. Some of her works have yet to be published; those that were published in her lifetime were largely forgotten after she stopped composing. Scholarship and interest in her compositions revived in 1976. The Rebecca Clarke Society was established in 2000 to promote the study and performance of her music.

Start working on a new and inspiring cello work at: https://cellobello.org/repertoire/

Read this month's featured Blog! Enjoy "Reflections on the 17 Beethoven String Quartets: The Early Period Quartets" (Part 1 of 5) by Paul Katz

"It’s been a personal joy for me to revisit the album notes I wrote 45 years ago for the Cleveland Quartet’s recorded Beethoven Quartet Cycle on RCA Victor. The 17 quartets of Beethoven were the core of our 26-year concertizing career as we immersed ourselves in research, score study, years of exhilarating rehearsals, two recorded cycles, 30 complete cycles in the major capitals of the world, and literally thousands of Beethoven quartet performances. Musicians generally agree that there is no other music as rewarding or profound in all of western music. These masterpieces have challenged me as a musician and enriched my life -what a privileged existence!

Formed in 1969, the CQ knew only 2 Beethoven quartets for the 1970 Beethoven bi-centennial year, but we joked that we would be ready for 2020! Though the Cleveland Quartet is no longer active, I could not let this special year go by without participating in some way, and so I returned to my notes written between 1975-1980, and reduced and edited them for this series of CelloBello blogs. The original project was voluminous – 3 boxed sets of LP vinyl, with written liner notes discussing each individual quartet. I have taken about 25% of that original project and present it here in a five-part series.

No composer has expressed Humankind’s deepest emotional states as profoundly as Beethoven. There is a heartfelt depth to the musical experience, an enlightened level of consciousness, a sincerity and nobleness of concept that enriches and inspires. “Those who understand (my music) must be freed by it from all the miseries that others drag about within themselves,” Beethoven is reported to have said. Whether or not he actually uttered these words is ultimately unimportant, for generations have found in his music the noblest and purest expression of universally shared human values. Pain and suffering (which he knew better than most) are beautifully expressed to us as a necessary part of the synthesis of life. Beethoven’s contemporaries described him as unkempt, emotionally volatile, and unable to keep most friends or employees. So we sometimes hear despair and anger, even rage – but never hate – not a sarcastic, cynical or bitter note. In fact, Beethoven was constantly helping others in need, was capable of extending his hand to an adversary, was a man with a warm and generous heart who philosophically and emotionally cared deeply for all of humanity. He was a person of strong principles and integrity whose strength of character shaped the core values of his life and his music. It is why generations have been uplifted and inspired, and why we who perform his music spend a lifetime of study in our efforts to do justice to his genius.

The Three Compositional Periods of Beethoven

The 16 quartets and Grosse Fuge span Beethoven’s entire mature compositional career and more clearly than any other medium of expression (i.e., symphony, concerto or sonata) illuminate a spiritual growth that eventually was to reach a transcendent level of awareness. The 19th-century scholar Wilhelm von Lenz was the first to observe that Beethoven’s compositions fall into three distinctly different style periods. D’lndy refers to these 3 periods descriptively as “imitation, externalization and reflection”, and the six Op. 18 quartets, written between 1798-1800, are from the early period of “imitation”. While these six quartets do reflect the classical period aesthetics of emotional restraint and attention to traditional formal rules of composition, “imitation” is a bit simplistic. One already hears in these quartets some of the power and strength we will come to admire in later Beethoven. Beethoven at 28 years is certainly more robust and hardier than Mozart and even Haydn, the two musical giants of this time.

Following the completion of the six Op. 18 quartets, advancing deafness led to personal agony and contemplated su***de: “Only one thing, Art, held me back”. The ensuing middle period (including the three Op. 59 quartets, Op.74 and 95) was, as Beethoven scholar Joseph Kerman observed, “more revolutionary than evolutionary’’ and paved the way for the Romantic period of the next 100 years. Compositions took on a more highly emotional, personal form of expression, traditional classical structures were expanded and Beethoven challenged the Classic Period’s rules and norms . The late period ( Op. 127,130,131,132,135, and the Grosse Fuge. Op. 133) was one of internalization, more introspective and spiritual, reflecting 20 years of suffering and isolation due to deafness. Here is music so profound, uplifting, consoling, that it is often equated with the spirituality of a Jesus or Ghandi.

The Early Period Quartets (Op. 18 #1-6)

The Op. 18 quartets, finished before his 30th birthday, were among the final works of his early period, a time in which he viewed Haydn and Mozart as both examples to emulate and rivals to surpass. In fact, these are masterpieces worthy of standing alongside the most celebrated quartets of Mozart and Haydn and forcefully demonstrate his expressive and communicative gift, a mastery of compositional technique and the sincerity and strength of his musical personality. Classical ideals are valued, yet one often feels his passion and temperament ready to burst the bonds of self-restraint. We now know that his more intensely personal, emotional compositions, which heralded the beginning of the Romantic Age, were only a few years away.

In November of 1792, less than a year after the death of Mozart, Beethoven left his hometown of Bonn, Germany for study with Haydn in Vienna and the pursuit of a dual career of composer/virtuoso pianist. In retrospect we see that these years preceding the writing of the Op. 18 quartets were the happiest, most rewarding of the composer’s life. The irony and cruelty of the loss of his hearing was still in the future, and the musical stimulation found in Vienna, the cultural Mecca of Europe, was..."

Read more: https://cellobello.org/cello-blog/chamber_music/reflections-on-the-17-beethoven-string-quartets/

This fall marked a major milestone for CelloBello: Chamber Music America has officially acquired CelloBello and our vast teaching library, ensuring that Paul Katz’s pedagogical legacy will continue to grow and reach cellists nationwide. 🎻✨

The acquisition was celebrated in Boston on November 12 at Continuo: The CelloBello Legacy Gala, headlined by the incomparable Yo-Yo Ma. The evening honored the impact of CelloBello’s mission and the bright future ahead as part of CMA’s education and artistic learning portfolio.

We are deeply grateful to Nancy and Richard Lubin, honorary chairs of the event, and to The Richard K. Lubin Family Foundation for their generous leading gift establishing the CelloBello Legacy Endowment.